ABIT goes back to what it does best

Providing this board has rock-solid stability, it could be a return to the good old days for ABIT...

CeBIT 2006: With ABIT's financial problems seeming to be a thing of the past, due to the USI buy out that will be completed over the next few months, ABIT has taken a trip back to the good old days where they evidently had enthusiasts at heart.

One of the company's upcoming socket AM2 motherboards, known as the KN9 SLI, has one of the best layouts we've ever seen. I sat down studying this board layout for a good fifteen minutes on the train home this evening and I'm struggling to find anything wrong with it thus far.

The KN9 SLI motherboard is a standard ATX board and has support for socket AM2, DDR2 memory, six SATA II ports, ten USB 2.0 ports and dual x8 SLI, along with ABIT's Silent OTES cooling system. It's based on NVIDIA's MCP55 single-chip solution, which we believe is their upcoming nForce5 product. We'll have more information on nForce5 before we leave CeBIT.

Everything is close to the edge of the board, making cable routing an absolute joy. The only slight issue I can see is that the 4-pin molex connector is not in an ideal position, but we're told that having this plug close to the PCI-Express x16 slots makes for cleaner power to those ports.

The board will be aimed at the more mainstream segment with a very affordable price tag. However, ABIT representatives couldn't give us a clear idea of price at this time.

Do you think this motherboard could prove be the start of the ABIT revolution? Let us know your thoughts on the board in the usual place.